Nov. 14-21

Thank you to all parents for coming to the student-led conferences this week. The students did a really good job of evaluating themselves and presenting, which are both complex skills. 

All week the students were engaged in a great deal of self reflection and self evaluation, which I believe is very important to growth and learning. They continued to prepare for their student-led interviews, evaluated and examined their success on the CASI test, which is a reading comprehension test, and evaluated their own persuasive paragraphs. I have been very impressed with the students' abilities to accurately access their strengths and weaknesses, and also their ability to address next steps.

This week we looked at the CASI exemplars, and noticed the differences between level 1, 2, 3 and 4 answers. The class reflected that by adding more details from the text they could have written better answers. We also discovered that, as a class, they needed more work on antonyms, synonyms, the parts of speech and punctuation. This will continue to be a focus in class and in homework.

This week's homework is as follows:

Daily:

• read for at least 20 minutes. I cannot overemphasise the importance of this! Students, take a minute to talk about your reading, make connections, predictions and wonder. Remember that reading is thinking. 
• continue to practise typing
• practise the 9 times tables and review 2-8

Divide up during the week:

• math patterning
• synonyms and antonyms worksheet
• cursive practice
• cloze activity- fill in the blanks with words that make sense

Remember, practise and persist! :-)

Best,

Bronwyn Davidson